[saghm]

I like to call this the "YZ answer"; I'm asking Y, which is the actual question I have, but someone else tries to convince me that my "real" question is "Z" because they happen to know the answer to that.

Tangentially related, but does anyone else besides me have an irrationally strong dislike of the name "XY problem" for this phenomenon? I feel like that name could apply equally well to basically any problem where you have two things you could call "X and Y", which is...a lot of problems. Why not call this something like the "mistaken question" problem or the "incorrect premise" problem?

[JdeBP]

I refer you to Mark-Jason Dominus's original explanation of what X and Y had to be. It got renamed "XY Problem" after the fact, and that name didn't take off for a long time, really not until Stack Overflow appeared and became popular, well over a decade after MJD posted about this and well after many of us had for that time not been calling it this on volunteer-support mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.h...

[plagiarist]

On Stackoverflow in particular, there is also a ~YY answer. You explain that you specifically don't want Y, then someone tells you you are wrong and to simply use Y.

[kloch]

Might as well just call this the "Stackoverflow problem", although it is really a family of problems where either the requestor or (typically) the responses are less than helpful.

As a third party searcher looking for answers to a specific problem, I would prefer to see a direct solution to the stated question first, even if it is followed by admonitions that "you probably don't want to do that" or "this other thing is a better approach".

[einpoklum]

Well, yes, but many of the times people on SO say they don't want to use Y, it's because of some assumptions they have about Y, and actually they do want to use Y, or use it differently than usual etc.

[pishpash]

You're saying the problem isn't what the XY problem is, but that it isn't called Z. So an XYZ problem. /s